Your Right to Know

GOP leaders in the House have again delayed action on a proposed Medicaid expansion, drawing
fire about their intentions from Democrats and other supporters of extending tax-funded health
coverage to 275,000 poor Ohioans.

House Speaker William G. Batchelder now says the House will not even reconvene until October,
pushing against a deadline Gov. John Kasich’s administration says it must meet to have new
eligibility guidelines in place by Jan. 1. That’s when President Barack Obama’s health-care law
requires most Americans to have coverage or pay a tax penalty.

“Republicans are just sitting on their hands, and we’re kind of tired of it,” Rep. Mike Foley, a
Cleveland Democrat said. “My belief is Republican leadership is either insincere or inept.”

In recent months there has been talk in the House of having a Medicaid expansion or reform bill
ready by the end of June, just after Labor Day, mid-September, or the beginning of October.
Initially there was to be a single Medicaid bill; more recently GOP leaders say there might be a
dozen.

A House committee has been meeting during the summer to study expansion, which Kasich proposed
in February as part of his two-year budget — which House Republicans stripped from the
bill.Batchelder, R-Medina, told reporters in an interview made public by Ohio Capital Blog that
Oct. 1 would be too soon of a deadline for having bills ready.

The governor “talks about expansion. I don’t think that’s a good idea. Reform is a good idea,”
Batchelder said, referring to the work as crafting “Obamacare language.” Kasich has repeatedly
sought to separate Medicaid expansion from the federal health-care law.

Batchelder said something will pass by the end of the year, but avoided saying it would be
expansion. “At the end of the day, I can’t tell you what will happen,” he said. “We will have a
usable piece of legislation.”

The sidestepping won Batchelder kudos this week from conservatives fighting to defund Obamacare
and urging states to oppose Medicaid expansion.

“We visited your speaker ... and there are a lot of good Republicans in the House saying no. The
majority of states have said no. They are looking past the next budget cycle and saying this is
going to hurt the state over 10 years,” former South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint, who heads the
conservative Heritage Foundation, told those gathered for a town hall in Columbus on Tuesday
night.

“There are better ways to help people and show compassion than to trap them in government
bureaucracy.”

DeMint said Kasich, whose name drew boos from the crowd, was misguided in his call for Medicaid
expansion.

“The way this is funded is very tempting to governors. They are going to give you big dollars in
the first few years to add a whole lot of people to your Medicaid rolls. Medicaid is already
bankrupting states all over. And doctors don’t want to see you if you’re on Medicaid because it’s
not paying them enough. So put all these people on, over 10 years, it is going to cost Ohio
billions and billions of dollars. It’s fool’s gold,” DeMint said.

In Ohio, legislative leaders have expressed concerns about the cost and stressed that they want
reforms such as drug treatment, work-force development and growth caps on Medicaid spending. Tea
party-affiliated groups threatened to run primaries against GOP lawmakers who support
expansion.

Michigan is poised to become the 25th state to approve expansion, according to the Kaiser Family
Foundation. Ohio is among five states still debating the issue, while 21 states are opting out.